“Goodly Lord, what a wit-snapper are you!” (Merchant of Venice, III.v.45)

“I’m not a socialist, but I talk like one on TV”

Redistribution of wealth through taxation of the top earners and handouts to the bottom is a hallmark of socialist economic theory. So why does Barack Obama and his surrogates chafe so mightily when the word “socialism” comes up, especially when Obama takes exactly that stance on the campaign trail?

Witness this encounter with a plumber who would see his taxes go up under an Obama administration:

Obama: “It’s not that I want to punish your success, I just want to make sure that everybody that is behind you, that they have a chance for success too. I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

No, Sen. Obama doesn’t want to punish anybody’s success. All he’s going to do is confiscate the fruits of that success through taxation, and hand them out to those who either didn’t succeed or didn’t even try. In modern political parlance, we call that “welfare.” In classical economic theory, we call it “socialism.”

Either way, it’s tough to dress up Obama’s tax plan as anything other than “socialism,” whether you call it “spreading the wealth around” or not. Maybe that’s why the word “socialism” gets so many goats in the Obama camp.

UPDATE II: The plumber is no longer “Unnamed Plumber.” His name is Joe Wurzelbacher, he was just interviewed on Neil Cavuto’s “Your World,” and he was plenty unsettled by his conversation with Sen. Obama. (Yes, he dejectedly used the “S” word as well.)

Seriously, both candidates are going to “spread the wealth around.” That’s what the Federal Government is all about. Instead of asking who’s going to tax me more, Joe Plumber needed to ask, Why does the federal government take a third of my earnings in the first place? The two parties have us focused on such a narrow part of the political spectrum that we don’t even have the imagination to think bigger. We need smaller government, less taxes, less nation building, and less government intervention in our lives. What we need is a man like Ron Paul leading the country. You can’t be a Republican or a conservative and support the direction the party is going. What you can support is Freedom, Liberty and the Constitution! Start thinking bigger than these issues. Our voices will be heard!